Before It All Went Down
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It looks as if Ying Sheng is trying to demolish the entire room. He’s pulled the whole of the desks’ drawers out without any care to the delicate documents now all scattered onto the ground. He scarcely needs to guess to whom those prominent, dusty boot prints dotted with red gory giblets all over the files and papers belong to. The craziest thing still is definitely how half of the rows of shelves have just been toppled over like domino pieces with its contents all falling down onto the floor, which must have been that loudest bang Du Yixin heard earlier.
“…” Du Yixin asks hesitantly, “maybe I can open the door and let you work that energy out on them instead?”
Ying Sheng rolls his eyes at him, “can’t you see I’m looking for stuff?”
“The hell could you even find like this?! You threw everything on the ground already.”
Du Yixin crouches and picks up a file. Thankfully the paper inside didn’t rip. It looks like a contract with mind-boggling amounts of dosh involved. Du Yixin reads the document more carefully and then says, “I knew it! This is a black hospital involved in illegal organ harvests. They’re making ungodly amounts of money from it too,” he shows Ying Sheng the document while pointing his camera at it, but it still doesn’t move the progress bar any.
Yet the other person is entirely disinterested. He walks over to the row where Du Yixin found the patients’ files, and a powerful kick later the shelves are fallen over again.
‘What the fuck are you actually doing?!’ Du Yixin can’t help but wonder out loud in his mind. Although Ying Sheng is violent and destructive, he still doesn’t just get violent and destructive for no reason at all. He watches as Ying Sheng kneels down, looking over the shelf itself, it seems, instead of the scattered files and documents.
Something finally clicks in Du Yixin’s mind and he asks, “you’re looking for explode-able things?”
He has a vague idea that Ying Sheng’s ability is blowing things up and it has to do with the metal rings somehow, but the rings are single-use only as they’re unable to withstand the force of the explosion itself.
“Hmph, I guess you’re not as dumb as you looked,” still not finding anything worthwhile, Ying Sheng pats the dust on his clothes away as he stands back up, explaining, “I can use any metal, to varying effects. Silver is best, then iron, and they must be as close to pure elements as possible. No alloys or whatever. Other commonly available metals make nothing better than firecrackers.”
“I see. I’ll also keep an eye out.”
While clues are important, they’re currently still trapped in this room right now. They will have to somehow deal with the nurses outside the door. In that sense, it is perhaps more important to look for metallic objects for Ying Sheng than looking for clues. Besides, Du Yixin looks at the myriad of papers Ying Sheng is just thoughtlessly trampling underfoot, and thinks that even without Ying Sheng’s destruction, it would have taken them ages to go through them all anyway, so it is probably safe to assume there isn’t actually any worthwhile clues among them.
But then he notices something out of the corner of his eye. It is a wooden desk Ying Sheng just kicked right over, and it happens to show the laminated newspaper clippings that are perhaps stuck with glue onto its surface prominently. Compared to the yellowed papers and documents, this newspaper clipping looks much whiter.
He carefully looks it over, and sees a date of publication a few weeks after that latest patient report. Red ink has circled out a small news report written at the corner, which says that a local hospital caught fire of reasons currently under investigation. The fire engines were too late when they reached the location, and all medical staff and patients are reported dead.
It seems reasonable to assume this ‘local hospital’ referred to this hospital they are in right now.
The hospital has become abandoned due to a fire incident. It’s suspicious how there are zero survivors at all, but given the locked up fire safety exits they saw, it’s not completely out of the question. He can’t help but suspect that the illegal organ trading had a part to play in this hospital becoming haunted besides the fire, however.
From the contract he read just now, party A is this hospital. If he recalls, the name of the hospital was –
“Liu Village Hospital,” mutters Du Yixin.
Suddenly, a gust of wind somehow picks up in the locked, airtight room. It blows the lamination right open and has even taken the news clipping with it. Du Yixin reflexively tries to grab hold of it, but the clipping somehow slips past his fingers and is blown under the desk. Du Yixin leans on the desk for support to retrieve it when something unbelievable happens.
It is like somehow watching the fast rewinding of a tape live in person inside the tape. He sees the desk rise back upright and the clipping flying back out, falling back into place, and turning in colour. He looks around, only to see the fallen shelves rises back up as the scattered documents all fly back into the air and back into the cardboard boxes. He looks up, and the old, mouldy ceiling also seems to be turning back in time. The stains disappear, the fallen, chipped off paint goes back into place, and the archive room turns back to an off-white colour. Looking back down, the wooden desk looks as good as new.
Suddenly, the door swings right open, revealing doctors and nurses in their white gowns ‘moonwalking’ inside and out, not noticing the two people in the middle of the room at all. His eyes looked away for just one second and the clipping has already been returned to the original newspaper. Less than a second later, a moonwalking nurse has taken it outside the door.
The rewinding goes faster and faster, and the movements of the hospital staff are forming afterimages already. Eventually, with a white flash, everything stops. Du Yixin and Ying Sheng are still inside the Archives, but not the original Archives. Bright white light is illuminating the entire room. There are some green pot plants decorating the room. The floor is immaculate. They’re underground, but the atmosphere really suggests otherwise.
As for the original wooden desk, there are no files on it save for a pile of adverts.
[Still troubled being unable to pay your medical bills alone? Still saddened that there is no one to care for you when you most need it? Our hospital offers complete and comprehensive hospitality services, completely free of charge! The cost of our procedures and medicine are as low as 1/10th of the market rate! We even guarantee that if treatment is unsuccessful, we will not charge you a single dime. Liu Village Hospital, the one that cares about those who have to suffer illnesses alone]
After the usual ‘TOCs apply’ and whatnot, there is a date for when this offer expires, and shockingly, they’ve been turned back in time to the year the hospital caught fire. Although he doesn’t know the exact date they’re at, but given the patient files ended abruptly some time this year, they’re probably at the precipice of the hospital catching fire and killing all its staff members and patients inside.
He does wonder what triggered the time flowing back in the first place though. Is it the desk? The clipping?
Putting that question aside, Du Yixin looks at his camera again, where the progress bar has finally moved. Currently, it stands at 25%. ‘Save,’ he mutters to himself, hoping that this wouldn’t be a dead save. They couldn’t have travelled back in time just to end up adding to the charred corpses now, would they?
Du Yixin is about to call out to Ying Sheng when he sees him looking at the door. Right now the door is shut and there isn’t any noise outside. It should be safe to assume the self-replicating nurses are also left in the original time.
“What is it?”
“Someone is coming.”
Du Yixin listens quietly and also hears faint footsteps now. He quickly says, “then we need to hide right now!”
Though the Archives is filled to the brim with cardboard boxes and files. There isn’t anywhere really safe to hide.
“No need,” there is bloodlust in Ying Sheng’s expression, as the surgical knife in his hand makes a beautiful silver arc, “the people outside are still human right? Then just kill them all.”
In the original timeline, meanwhile, Xiao Rou is despondent, saying, “this won’t open either,” before moving aside.
It’s more than ten minutes since they went separate ways from Du Yixin and Ying Sheng. They have moved deeper through the corridor since, but failed to find anything significant. Just now they’ve tried the last door in this corridor.
They did find another fire exit earlier, but it’s still inexplicably chained up.
“Looks like we need to get the magnetic card somehow,” they only have the way they came to return, back to where all the ghost nurse are. An Wenhui remarks, “we’ll have to go back.”
“Are, are they still fine?”
“Who knows. Dead, or successfully escaped.”
“My fault…” Xiao Rou is inexplicably irritated. Biting her fingernails, she asks, “is it my fault if he died?”
An Wenhui sighs, and asks, “say, missus, do you really have to go through all this drama? The other man also died just now and you didn’t seem nearly as melodramatic.”
Xiao Rou doesn’t reply. Obviously she’s not some mystical saint who cares for each and every life. But now that she is no longer in a life-or-death situation, she’s starting to worry about outside.
‘Du Yixin’ is important. Not the person of course, but the value his name carries. As a clerk, she only vaguely knows the organisation wants to find someone using the man. She desperately wants to rise up in her ranks, which is why she was actually acting outside the organisation’s orders by approaching him of her own accord.
If Du Yixin did die here, the organisation will give her hell for it.
“…”
No, it’s not over yet. She takes a deep breath and puts her hand back down.
Think back to why she wanted to rise in ranks. She heard they receive enormous, unbelievable paychecks. She needs money, desperately, and so even if Du Yixin died, if she manages to acquire the high-level key from this game and sell it to Whitebird, even if they still decide to expel her, she could then look for the next high-paying opportunity.
She should believe in herself more. She’s the ‘Protagonist.’ Thinking normally, she will survive to the very end.
Meanwhile, Ruri, who has been silent up to this point, speaks up, “they’re back.”
TL’s notes: Here’s question of the day for you – Ying Sheng hurried over of his own accord. Xiao Rou is here of her own accord. Then who is the Whitebird operative that was ordered to retrieve this key in the first place?
Oriental Rabbit 
I caught up TwT
I think it’s Ruri. I don’t know what to think about An Weihui, I thought he was the protagonist but since he’s not, maybe he’s the one with the key, and he participates in the game for the thrill?
Honestly, I find it weird that Xiao Rou works for Whitebird. I thought they would choose soldiers and mercenaries to work for them, not some random people who need money. I mean, she can’t even choose between running and fighting but thinks she will survive, she’s a cannon fodder.
Thanks for the translation!
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Well there’s only two options… unless… nahhh.
I’mma say An Weihui cuz he’s weirder
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